Expo Notes: AntiCrop fills in missing parts of a photo

Adva-Soft's new and somewhat counterintuitively named AntiCrop is an iPhone and iPad photography app that does not—as the name might imply—take an ideological position against cropping. Rather, AntiCrop is used to fill in areas of a photo when you change its aspect ratio or otherwise enlarge it, or crop it in a different way. AntiCrop also facilitates photo straightening.

AntiCrop 1.0, which costs $1, is the first application that lets users extend and fill in their photos on the go. The app is easy to use, and works with a few finger swipes to drag photo borders in any direction. The app recognizes elements on the outer edges of a photo, replicates them, and adds border strips to the picture to enlarge it. As you move an image or change its dimensions, the app automatically fills in the missing areas based on what's already in the picture.

The app lets you specify orientation in portrait or landscape and also lets you specify standard photo sizes within those orientations. With any of the functions, you can undo and redo.

The easiest way to envision AntiCrop is as a variation of the Content Aware Fill function that was introduced in Photoshop CS5, but using Adva-Soft's own algorithm.

Like Photoshop's utility, AntiCrop does not always work perfectly, and tends to be more accurate when the image composition is plain or somewhat uniform, such as sky, sand, or perhaps foliage. The documentation even warns users not to use the program to "complete unpredictable picture areas—human faces, buildings, or other objects, since the application was not designed for these kinds of tasks."

We may be hearing more about AntiCrop soon, as it's on the way to the Mac desktop in the next few months, according to its developer.